


Everybody Here is a Cloud

by sinuous_curve



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Community: i_reversebang, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-18 20:00:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinuous_curve/pseuds/sinuous_curve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“It’s not all work, you know,” Eames says one night when they’ve finished a job and they’re in bed together. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Here is a Cloud

**Author's Note:**

> This story is based on [ utterly gorgeous art](http://bluelittlepig.livejournal.com/35339.html) by bluelittlepig. Seriously, guys, I literally clapped my hands in glee when I got the final versions in my inbox. So before you do anything else, please go leave some awesome feedback. Additionally, bluelittlepig has all my thanks for being incredibly kind, patient, and understanding when an excess of real life intervened in me finishing the first story I started for this.
> 
> Betaed by the ever helpful and lovely, the staunch defender of commas, ignipes.

“It’s not all work, you know,” Eames says one night when they’ve finished a job and they’re in bed together.

Arthur snorts behind Ariadne, one leg tossed over her hip in a gesture of casual, unthinking possession echoed in the arm stretched across the top of the pillows so he can keep his fingers pushed through Eames’ hair. They’re close to the equator and the night was hot and damp even before they tumbled into the creaking bed. The touch of sweat-slippery skin should be unbearable, but it isn’t.

“It’s true,” Eames continues, arching an eyebrow. Smoke from his cigarette curls into the moonlit dark. The glowing tip burns like an ember. “We used to have fun, Arthur darling.”

“Then we started getting paid,” Arthur says wryly, ignoring the nickname. There’s amusement there, a fond nostalgia that Ariadne notices and inspects.

She’s fascinated by their shared, unspoken history. She has difficulty picturing it, them as young men who didn’t cast their definitions in terms of dreams and escapes and near misses. Eames tells jokes couched in alluded anecdotes and Arthur has an impressive repertoire of answering expressions. But there is something unlawful about the past and none of them prod too hard.

“What we do is fun,” she counters, loose and languid between their disparate bodies. She likes the comfort they have now and how it grounds her. There’s a release in having her skin laid open to their hands and mouths, even as she marvels at the improbability of the three of them being together as they are.

Eames chuckles. “Incidentally fun. There was a time, love, when we went under for the fun of it. Back in the day.”

Ariadne can never tell when Eames is laying tantalizing threads of thought at her feet with the intention of having her follow them through. He always sounds innocent, but that is an astonishing facade, like his smile that feigns perpetual ignorance. He has to know that Ariadne will ask, because Arthur already knows the answers. Besides, he will always be the most settled of the three of them.

“Well then,” she says. “Show me.”

Beside her, Arthur starts slightly. He’s the only one wearing any clothes, just boxers that ride low on his hips, and Ariadne can feel the brush of fabric against the back of her thigh. He likes to be prepared and likes the present and planning for the future. Ariadne constantly unsettles him and she knows Eames only makes it worse.

For a moment, Eames studies her, then he grins and crushes his cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. “If you insist,” he says, rolling off the bed with a squeal mattress springs. He pads to the discarded pile of clothes on the motel room floor and shoves them aside with his foot. The PASIV device looks brushed blue in the dark.

Ariadne and Arthur obediently roll onto their backs, pressed closed together to make sure there’s room left on the bed for Eames’ solid bulk. Her stomach has begun to leap and twist, like it still does when she hears the case’s latches unbuckle. It’s always excitement, never fear. She can’t be afraid of dreams.

“You know that thing isn’t supposed to be a toy,” Arthur says. He crosses his legs at the ankle and it takes Ariadne a moment to realize he’s joking behind the dry, flat tone.

Eames slides the cannula into the back of Arthur’s hand. “Ah, but we’re rebels then, aren’t we?” he says and kisses the tissue thin skin on the inside of Arthur’s wrist.

The prick of the needle barely registers as sensation to Ariadne any longer, especially when she’s chasing a dream with her mind flung wide open. It’s easier when it’s just Eames and Arthur and no mark, because she trusts them. Enough time has passed that even their projections leave the others alone, which may or may not technically be possible.

Eames repeats the process with her hand, right now the kiss. “Are you certain about this?” he asks. “You may not be prepared for my idea of fun.”

Ariadne snorts and reaches up to touch the tips of her fingers to his cheek. “You might be surprised.”

Eames’ smile is knowing and tinged with his usual lechery, but it’s genuine. He lays down on the remaining bit of bed and pushes a third cannula beneath this skin of his hand. Ariadne feels indulgent and secretive, lying in the dark crushed in the small space between their bodies. It’s like they’re breaking an unspoken rule of due reverence to dreams.

“Hold tight everyone,” Eames says and presses the red button.

In the moment before Ariadne opens her eyes, she feels sunshine on her face and hears the faint, soft creaking sound of something moving. Beneath her feet, the solid ground seems tilt, as though it’s ebbing in a steady rhythm. She can even smell things, wood and leather and the faintly oily tinge of wonderfully mechanical things.

“Oh,” Arthur says. “I can’t believe you remember this.”

Ariadne blinks. The world that sharpens into focus is a single room like the bridge of a ship, with a wide spread of windows curving around the front and to the sides. There are banks of buttons and switches spread along the front that look very important and faintly ridiculous, like someone tossed together a space ship and a typewriter and this is was what fell out.

It’s all brass and burnished gold and through the windows pours bright sky and sunlight and Ariadne understands, suddenly, that they’re _flying_.

Eames stands at the helm, which is a bit like a cross between a pirate ship’s wheel and a controller of a video game. He pilots with both hands, coaxing whatever ship they’re in to higher and higher altitudes. Lights on the panels blink and wink in different colors and patterns. It’s all oddly delightful to Ariadne and not at all like what she was expecting.

“Of course I remember,” Eames says, glancing over his shoulder at Arthur standing beside the window. “I nearly died of shock that you had this much imagination.”

“What is it?” Ariadne asks before Eames can keep up pretending that he’s never wanted to do anything but mock Arthur and before Arthur can settle into a thin-lipped silence.

Arthur pushes off from the window and stands in front of one of the banks of blinking, beeping, humming controls. He pushes a half dozen switches with careful hands, then says, “It’s from back when we thought everyone could be good at everything. When dream sharing was new, no one knew how people would react to having an active, conscious role over dreams. This was an experiment. And a training exercise.”

Eames laughs. “What he means is that we cobbled together everything we wanted to do as kids and made it real. In a sense.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Arthur turns and holds out his hand. “Come and look.”

Ariadne steps to his side, and Arthur’s hand presses to the small of her back. She can’t see anything but endless bright blue sky stretching out for a hundred thousand miles, so utterly unlike the damp night in a motel they left behind. Her fingers itch to get at the control panels, just to see how deep the details of the dream go. If she presses that odd oblong silver one, will anything happen? Or is it all just window dressing, the kind of shallow disregard for authenticity that Arthur resents because you never know what small detail will be the one that makes a difference.

But standing closer she can catch sight of _something_ that moves in time with the internal beat of the ship. It’s not steady, like a plane, but rather pulsing as though there’s something powerful like thousands of oars rowing a ship. “What?” she murmurs, leaning over the panel and craning her neck.

Eames chuckles. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

Ariadne sees _wings_. There are impossible wings on either side of the ship in rich, beautiful colors that she senses don’t exist in the real world. And then, looking up, she sees the graceful curve of a long neck covered in thick plates. “Oh my god,” she says, feeling dizzy with a kind of delight she hasn’t felt since Cobb first sank her into dreams and she folded a city in half.

“It’s a dragon,” she says, planting her fingers on the control panel and pushing forward as far as she can without bumping into the glass of the window. “A dragon ship.”

It’s like every dream she ever had as a little girl born of fairy tales brought to vivid, startling, improbable life. The dragon’s skin is rich plates of some burnished gold metal that’s never existed in the real world. It gleams in the light, bright and burning and beautiful. Every line looks utterly elegant to Ariadne, from the spread tips of the wings to the distant planes of its head.

Eames’ chuckle deeps into genuine laughter and she can hear, running beneath that, the soft sound of Arthur’s own snorted amusement. “It is,” Eames agrees, sounding just a bit too genuinely proud for Ariadne to believe that casualness of his tone. “Properly speaking, it’s the dragon our dear Arthur created in the days when Cobb thought he could make Architects of us all. Now, it’s a bit too noticeable to be practical, but it’s impressive nonetheless.”

“And this is fun?” Ariadne asks, settling back on her heels.

Arthur shrugs. “It’s this or Eames’s favorite leather and latex bar.”

“That was meant to be private.”

“Can I fly it?” Ariadne asks. Her palms itch to touch the world she’s immersed in. She wants to push the boundaries of what’s already been created and maybe, just a little, she wants to leave her stamp on an old, shared dream. She feels, sometimes, the absence of her history with them and she doesn’t begrudge it. She yearns for it.

Eames steps back from the helm that doesn’t look anything at all like anything real and is better for it, and Ariadne takes his place. She’s nearly a foot shorter than him, so it ought to be a stretch for her to fit into the same space, but it isn’t. In their work, it’s a disadvantage for dreams to have such internal inconsistency, but this isn’t meant to fool anyone but themselves. She settles her hands around worn, warm wood and can feel the hum of the dragon ship buzzing into her fingers and up her arms.

“What do I do?” she asks.

Arthur angles himself to stand at her right shoulder and Eames takes up position on her left. She likes that she can differentiate between their bodies without looking and without having to touch. It’s maybe a bit of temperature and maybe a bit of practice, but they feel different and distinct to her whenever they’re close.

“It’s a dream,” Arthur says. “Do whatever you want.”

Ariadne smiles to herself and pulls back the helm as far as it will go.

The dragon ship bursts upward with a shudder of force that rumbles through the wood and metal bones, sending the myriad lights into a frenzy of frantic bleeping and blinking. Eames lets out a shout that’s shot through with glee and Arthur’s hand clamps down on her shoulder. Ariadne’s body nearly vibrates with the force of it and she doesn’t care at all, because she has always wanted to fly and it always felt like the one thing definitively out of her grasp.

She isn’t the reckless one out of the three of them. She never has been. Her rebellion comes out in small bursts, calculated to look like slightly badly conceived plans or things done in the service of something else. When she ran headlong into Cobb’s mind it was the same thing; a need to _know_ and understand and do something because she wants it and because she can.

It’s something beyond and above exhilarating to see the wings of the ship cutting through the sky and feel their pulse beneath her feet. Ariadne believes in dreams in ways that she can’t any longer with reality, because dreams let her build beyond any constrictions and boundaries. In reality she is caught in the definitions she’s made for herself, just like Arthur and Eames.

“You’re mad,” Eames yells in her ear, and Ariadne laughs deep down from the put of her stomach.

“It’s just a dream!” she cries back, wondering if she can pull back even farther and break the rules of reality that cling to all dreams like cobwebs. It’s easier and harder when she knows she’s doing it, because the realm of possibility stretches out before her with a vastness that can sometimes crumple her creativity. It’s simpler, when there are rules that have to be followed.

And only when the ship really does feel like the imaginary bolts and screws will twist apart into the base parts and send them hurtling through the sky to die very unreal, and very painful deaths does Ariadne release the helm and let the dragon ship hurtle back down to a level pitch that has them all crashing forward.

Arthur’s white knuckled hand oh so slowly peels back from her shoulder and Eames presses a sloppy, wildly enthusiastic kiss to the skin just behind her ear. His mouth his hot and soft and he, for all his insistence on survival, thrills in the danger more than anyone else Ariadne has ever met. “Mad, brilliant girl,” he mutters, voice threaded with exhilaration.

“Are you okay?” Ariadne asks, a little surprise at the breathless rush of her voice. She thinks if she pulled her hands away from the helm they would shake, but she likes that. Loves it, a little, because the nature of the job so often means being subtle enough not to be detected. And when adrenaline floods through her system it’s usually because the guns have come out and being shot in a dream hurts as real as anything.

She turns her head and looks at Arthur, standing with his back ramrod straight as his chest heaves in short, controlled bursts. “You,” he says, “are as bad as him,” and expels a long breath that eases at the end to a loose-shouldered slump. “You’re going to put me into an early grave.”

Ariadne pushes up on her toes and kisses the corner of his mouth, but she doesn’t let go of the helm. “It’s fun.”

Eames snorts out an approving laugh and leans against the panel, bracing his weight with a hand carefully placed amidst the buttons. They’ve finally calmed down a little with their blinking and there are a thousand arrayed switches that Ariadne hasn’t touched. The potential curls around the base of her spine with the promise of a high grater than anything a drug could ever give her.

“It’s your fault,” he says to Arthur. “You made this beast in the first place.”

Arthur straightens his already straight shirt and jacket and squares his chin. “One could argue that I never intended it to be used to cheat death, even if it is a metaphorical death. I think neither of you have been shot enough times to appreciate how unpleasant dying in dream space can be.”

Idly, carefully, Ariadne reaches with hand to flick a little silver switch in a series of half a dozen identical ones. The windows tint darker suddenly, to a cool blue that casts the bright sky in twilight colors. “Why did you make it?” she asks.

“It was an experiment,” Eames answers for him.

Ariadne casts them both skeptical glances. “To do what? See who could create a better Dungeons and Dragons character?”

“No.” Arthur looks a touch affronted at the idea and Ariadne hides her smile looking down to flick another switch, this one bronze, that doesn’t seem to do anything but light up a little red knob in a rhythmic pattern that might be Morse. “It was to see how far you push dreams when you were aware of what you were doing.”

“There was ever a question?”

“Of course,” Eames says. “The technology was developed for basically nothing more than hyperrealistic war scenarios. There was never any interest, at first, in accomplishing other things. When the, shall we say, less reputable and vastly more creative element got their hands it, there were endless amount of unexplored options. No one knew what minds who were aware they were dreaming could do. So, we spent a lot of time just making things.”

“To see if you could,” Ariadne says, nodding.

“To see if we could,” Arthur repeats, looking out the window at the vast, empty sky. “It was this kind of thing, mostly. Practically useless, for what we were envisioning doing with the technology. But it was still interesting.”

Eames throws out a hand to the hollow middle of the ship, the lines of metal and wood that curl protectively around them. “We spent time in here,” he says, fondly. “Like being teenagers, a bit. Sneaking off, but not getting naked in the back of a car, spending time in the dragon. For awhile, people that was a euphemism.”

There are a thousand affectionate things Ariadne could say to both of them, to her boys that she only calls her boys in her head, but she swallows down the words and settles for her hands on the helm of the ship that’s a dragon and half made of memories. They aren’t like that, for all that there is something enduring between the three of them that isn’t touched or acknowledged. The reality that any day they could take three planes to three places and that would be the end is too immediate for unnecessary displays.

But she still appreciates standing where she is, with Eames and Arthur on either side. She does.

Ariadne eases the helm to the right, and the ship turns gracefully. At the highest point, she can see the whole magnificent, illogical spread of the dragon’s wing in the window, and she wonders what it would take to step outside the ship and look at her in all her glory. She makes a note.

And then she sees another ship.

“What’s that?” she asks.

Arthur snorts, steadying his hands on the control panel. “That is an aftereffect of the technologies original purpose.”

“That,” Eames interjects with a grin, “is Arthur secretly wanting to play the dashing hero.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Ariadne says as the lights pick up their blinking and bleeping again. She turns the dragon toward the new ship and, suddenly, there are easily six odd, oblong figures rising up from the air beneath them. They cut a steady path toward the dragon, through wisps of cloud that somehow seem suddenly ominous.

“They’re the enemy,” Arthur says helpfully. “They’re projections, in a way. You have to shoot them down.”

There are so many things Ariadne could say about the inside of Arthur’s head having the same structure as a video game, but she feels the own kick of gut deep excitement in her system and seems a little hypocritical. It hurts to die in a dream, but it’s alluring to have a weapon in your hand that you know won’t kill people that don’t exist.

“Fancy a go?” Eames teases.

Ariadne grins. “Of course,” she says, and with a jerk of her hands sends the dragon ship careening forward.


End file.
